lucyrfisher Review of Sorry, Wrong Number

Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

Promising, but plot complications sent me to sleep

[6/10 · 4 June 2011]

I love movies of this era for the social comment. I like the glimpses we get of the characters' lives. Dr Alexander with his younger girlfriend in a sleazy nightclub, for instance. (I doubt that "cardiac neurotic" is still in the DSM as a diagnosis.) Sally Hunt lives in one of those New York apartments with a strange layout - you come straight into the kitchen, and all the other rooms seem to open off it. The little boy sleeps in a closet screened off only by a curtain. And if Barbara Stanwyck is so rich, surely she could afford to live somewhere quieter? Is Staten Island really semi-deserted? Who would build a clapboard Victorian house on a beach and name it "20 Dunstan Terrace"? Where are numbers 1-19? Why does Sally Hunt have a peculiar English accent? And why does Waldo Evans waffle about growing up in Surrey among horses, and his longing to buy a little place in "Dorking, England"?